The Beehive is a project management system created by Craigman Digital to manage the high volume and short turnaround times required by a growing market. The Beehive ingests projects – in this case, video encoding jobs – and outlines their workflows, tracks their assets, and assigns tasks to Craigman Digital's engineers. Users log in to the Beehive to find a to do list for the day, and that list is updated as new projects enter the queue throughout the day. When a task is finished, the engineer marks it complete and moves on to the next task. When a problem is encountered, the asset is flagged, the Beehive notifies the client of the problem and given instructions to correct it. Completed files are submitted to the compression farm, which automatically loads the videos into the client’s distribution queue.

The video processing workload has varied over the years. Our weekly demand has grown from 6 – 10 videos in 2003 to over 100 per week in 2011. While we once ingested standard definition music videos, standards have changed to high definition videos and even full-length features and concerts. Processing times can vary from less than an hour to over a day, depending on the asset. Managing the workload across several servers is critical.

Everything is automated with the exception of ingestion from tape, setting up the video parameters, processing the video based on those parameters, and quality control (having a human watch the video before it is sent to the farm). The processing is executed by compound scripts and applications which are created by and used by video engineers. We have begun development on a feature that will automatically ingest video processing parameters entered into the Beehive and launch the applications that will process the video. This feature will also identify available servers in our network and distribute and load balance the system to increase the efficiency of our processing time.